Art and Architecture, Together Again

Those with long memories may recall the days when New York modern art institutions were not only in tune with contemporary culture but also determined to drive it forward. At the New Museum of Contemporary Art, that spirit is back in force.

In late November, the museum broke ground on its new home on a decrepit strip of the Bowery on the Lower East Side. And while some of the design details are still being tweaked, it is now razor-clear that the building will do more to freshen the bond between Manhattan's art and architecture communities than any building since Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum of American Art opened on Madison Avenue four decades ago.

The aluminum-clad building, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, founders of the Tokyo architectural firm Sanaa, evokes a stack of mismatched boxes on the verge of toppling over. Firmly rooted in the present, it is a remarkably sensitive exploration of the relationship between art, architecture and the human beings who animate them.

The project, scheduled for completion in the fall of 2007, could not come at a better time. In recent years, it has become dismally clear that the art institutions that redefined New York culture in the 20th century are no longer invested in propelling it forward in the 21st. Despite its elegance, the recent $850 million expansion of the Museum of Modern Art had more to do with consolidating the museum's position as an arbiter of high taste than with engaging in the messy, ever-shifting realities of the art and cultural scenes.

In 2003 the Whitney Museum signaled that it valued security over experimentation when it dropped a radical design for an addition by Rem Koolhaas, eventually replacing it with a conservative proposal by Renzo Piano.

It would be unfair to expect the Modern to play the same cultural role it did in the 1930's, when it was probably the single most powerful force in introducing Americans to European Modernism. Yet as these institutions have quietly receded into middle age, they have left a void in the heart of the city. The New Museum is one of the few New York art institutions with the courage to fill it.

Rising seven stories at a choice site where Prince Street ends at the Bowery, the museum clearly sought to bind itself to what's left of the youthful downtown scene. Its position at the end of Prince, one of SoHo's main axes, suggests a link to the SoHo art scene of the 1960's and 1970's -- a nod to the creative fervor that reigned in the neighborhood before it was transformed into a glorified shopping mall.

The ghosts of SoHo drift in and out of the design. Wrapped in a woven aluminum mesh skin, the stacked forms give the composition a mysterious quality, suggesting a culture in constant flux.

They are also tough enough to stand up to the Bowery's mix of restaurant supply stores, dying single-room-occupancy hotels and shiny new residential towers. Amid the crush of commercial traffic from the Manhattan Bridge, the building will seem solid and industrial. At night, when the streets are barren, it is apt to be more ethereal and moody.

Sanaa is known for both the clean precision of its forms and a knack for unearthing the softer qualities of glass. The layering of transparent and reflective surfaces in the marvelous Christian Dior building in Tokyo, for example, give the interiors a luxurious milky quality, like layers of veils.

But the New Museum's design is intended as more than a metaphor; it is also to be a concrete realization of the museum's values. The street-level façade will be entirely transparent, like a shop window. The idea is to bring the experience of viewing art to the street, reaffirming the institution's role as a public forum. The main floor is divided lengthwise into a lobby and a loading dock that will be visible from the street, so that the process of transporting art is open to public view.

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The lobby, echoing the proportions of an old downtown loft, is divided into a series of lively public zones, beginning with a ticket counter and cafe and culminating in a large glass-enclosed gallery -- a fish bowl of the art world.

The informality of the arrangement reflects how the contemporary art world is changing as barriers between the various arts dissolve. Creation is a collaborative act in which the audience plays a role: at the New Museum, art, architecture, graphic design, film and the public will all jostle for attention.

That embracing vision extends to the very top of the museum, where a 3,000-square-foot multipurpose space will offer sweeping views over the area's old tenement blocks to the dense cluster of towers on Wall Street.

The quiet simplicity of the galleries, sandwiched in the middle floors, offers a momentary repose. The beauty of the shifting setbacks on each floor is that it allowed the architects to create skylights on every level, illuminating them with a blend of natural and artificial light.

In the fourth-floor gallery, for example, natural light will wash down the south wall through a long slotlike skylight while the rest of the room will be illuminated by lights hidden above a mesh ceiling.

Purists who believe that architecture should take a back seat to art may grumble that the uneven blend of natural and artificial light will be distracting. But the result will be atmospheric, with the mood of each room shifting slightly over the course of the day depending on the weather. In their choice of materials -- from the smooth concrete floors to the exposed steel I-beams -- the architects sensitize the visitor to the tactile qualities of the world around them. The aim is to lure us out of our everyday stupor, to open our hearts to the art.

Of course, one building alone cannot remake a culture. But Lisa Phillips, the museum's director, clearly found the right architect for her building. And she has brought in curators who have no interest in preserving the status quo; instead they envision the museum as a laboratory for cultural change.

The question on every New York architect's lips is whether the museum will be willing to organize the kind of architecture shows we so desperately crave: shows with a strong critical point of view, like the ones that MoMA mounted in its glory days.

Rarely, in today's New York, does a building project inspire so much confidence in the future.